When
I undertook to prepare a study on the present status of Turkisms in the
various Balkan languages, I was being somewhat overambitious. For to do full
justice to such a topic one should possess the sort of Sprachgefühl
which results only from a good firsthand knowledge of all Balkan languages, a
claim which unfortunately I cannot make. The only Balkan languages about
which I can speak with some degree of authority are my native Greek and, to
a much smaller extent, Albanian. Most of my remarks on the state of affairs
in the other languages are second-hand. Because of the somewhat subjective
nature of any study dealing with matters of style and connotation, many of
the judgments expressed here inevitably reflect my own personal way of
looking at a number of Turkisms. [*]

It
has become commonplace by now to say that the Balkan languages show great
similarities with respect to Turkisms — Bronsert 1968, p. 97.
[1]
Thus it was largely the same Turkish elements that were borrowed into each
language, and even the fate of individual Turkisms has been by and large the
same in all languages : some Turkisms have disappeared, some have become
well-anchored and virtually indispensable elements of a

*. The research for this study was made possible by a
Fourth-Quarter Fellowship from The College of The University of Chicago for
the summer of 1969. I wish to thank all those persons who contributed
comments and corrections, namely Academician Vladimir Georgiev and
Professors Henrik Birnbaum, Ivan Dujčev, Thomas Eeckman, E. P. Hamp, Pavle
Ivić, Boris Kremenliev, Basil Laourdas, Albert Lord, Josef Matl, Traian
Stoianovich, and Andreas Tietze. I am particularly grateful to my colleague
E. P. Hamp for going over a number of points with me one day before the oral
presentation of this paper.

1. All references are listed alphabetically (under the
same author chronologically) at the end.

88

given
language, others have acquired a pejorative, ironical, or vulgar
connotation, and so on. But there are also many differences from one
language to another: Turkisms which may be part and parcel of the literary
variety of one language may have been considerably lowered on the stylistic
scale of another or become historical words, and so forth. To my knowledge,
there are not at present enough detailed studies on the stylistic status of
specific Turkisms in individual Balkan languages. [2] Much
more work is needed before we can attempt a serious synthesis of the overall
Balkan situation — Bernstein 1968, p. 79; Bronsert 1968, pp. 97-98.

Unless specified otherwise, I shall be talking about the standard
[3] varieties of Albanian, [4] Bulgarian, Greek,
Macedonian, Rumanian, [5] and Serbocroatian. By "standard
language" we mean "a dialect, or some closely similar group of dialects
enjoying prestige as the speech of educated people of the capital city[6]
or of some other socially respected group" — Robins 1964, p. 57. I would like
to emphasize that it is educated SPEECH, even more than writing, that will
be our main concern. We should therefore keep in mind that educated speech
encompasses a wide variety of styles, from formal all the way to the
colloquial, relaxed style one uses in communicating with one's intimates.
The term 'Turkish' here refers exclusively to Osmanli Turkish. The elements
labelled as Turkish are often ultimately of Arabic or Persian origin, a fact
of little

3. This limitation was dictated, among other things, by
considerations of space. For, note that Balkan Turkisms are generally both
more numerous and more lively in the dialects than they are in the standard
languages — Hazai 1961, p. 103, n. 9; Ivić 1958, pp. 144, 234, 242-243;
Koneski 1965, pp. 101-102; Šăineanu 1900, p. 279; Stojanov 1952, p. 219;
Triantaphyllidēs 1963a, p. 62. We are not necessarily equating the notion of
dialect with that of RURAL dialect. Thus Škaljić (1966, p. 16) for one
refuses to pronounce himself on whether Serbocroatian Turkisms are used to a
greater extent in the villages or in the cities. On the other hand, Ivić
says that in the Serbocroatian- speaking area the influence of Turkish has
been stronger in the cities (1958, p. 245; cf. also pp. 192, 234, 242).
Similarly Skok (1937-1938, p. 168) regards it as a certainty that Turkisms
in Serbocroatian are by far more numerous in the towns than they are in the
villages. Indeed, the folk language in the mahallât of Balkan towns,
including the capital cities, is typically very rich in Turkish elements —
mahallât, plural of mahalle, is used here roughly in the sense of
French
quartiers populaires. Cf. Hristea 1958; Šăineanu 1900, p. 256.

And
so on. What these people are doing is compare Turkisms in their respective
languages — from culinary terms to obscenities. Turkish linguistic elements
constitute a common denominator (not the only one, to be sure) for the
spoken form of all Balkan languages. Turkish further reinforced the Balkan
linguistic union (Sprachbund) in certain respects, such as vocabulary
and 'phraseology' — in the sense of French phraséologie.
[10]
The influence of Turkish culture and of the Turkish language on the culture
and the languages of the Balkan peoples was very strong and embraced just
about every facet of material and spiritual life. Turkish linguistic
influence was felt mostly but by no means exclusively in the lexicon of
those languages — the notoriously least stable level in any language. It is
not necessary to repeat here how instrumental the Turks were in creating or
transforming urban centers in the Balkans — Skok 1935, pp. 252 ff.,
1937-1938, pp. 173-174; Stavrianos 1958, pp. 107-108. It is not surprising,
then, that Balkan terminology having to

7. I have not followed this principle everywhere with the
same consistency: thus I do not distinguish between those Turkisms which
entered Rumanian directly from Turkish and those very numerous ones which
passed through some intermediary, usually

Bulgarian — Šăineanu 1900, pp. 279-280.

8. Turkish imambayıldı 'a dish of aubergines with
oil'. For the sake of simplicity, Turkish equivalents of Balkan Turkisms are
given in their standard modern Turkish form. This obviously does not mean
that we necessarily regard precisely those standard forms as having served
as models for the Balkan Turkisms. For some interesting observations
concerning the dialectal situation of Balkan Turkish as it is reflected in
South Slavic Turkisms, see Hazai 1961, pp. 117ff. Also Bernstein 1968, p.
77.

do
with the handicrafts and with many other aspects of urban life abounds with
Turkish loanwords.

Great
numbers of Turkisms were to be found in all those parts of the Peninsula
which had remained under Ottoman domination for a prolonged period of time,
[11] and even on the territory of the fomer Danubian
Principalities, Walachia and Moldavia, where Turkish rule had been exercized
only indirectly — although admittedly there the influence of Turkish has
been smaller: Bronsert 1968, pp. 97, 99. There were of course regions where
Turkish linguistic influence was relatively greater. Those were urban or
rural areas with rather heavy Turkish colonization, as well as those regions
where a large part of the native population became Moslem — Mirčev 1952, pp.
117, 119; Ivić 1958, pp. 234, 242-243; Gołąb 1959, p. 27; Bernstein 1968,
pp. 76-77; Skok 1937-1938, pp. 167-168, 175.

The
latter remark, however, in no way implies that the number of Turkisms which
entered the speech of the non-Moslem population was somehow insignificant —
Skok 1935, p. 251. Indeed, I think that one of the sociolinguistically most
interesting questions that one can ask in connection with the adoption of
Turkish elements in the Balkans is this: why were so many words and
expressions borrowed, despite the religious and social barriers between the
Turks and the majority of their Balkan subjects? We are obviously not
speaking about the many terms that had to do with administration, law, the
army, and the like. And neither are we referring to words describing new
dishes, artifacts, trades, and so on, that is 'things' introduced into the
area by the Turks. We are speaking

11. The length of the occupation was probably a
contributing factor. Thus Northern Greece and some Greek islands, which
remained within the Ottoman Empire until the first decades of the present
century, typically preserve a greater number of Turkisms than do those
regions which made up the new kingdom of Greece almost one century earlier.
It is just as plausible, however, that we have here a combination of
factors, rather than the effect of only one, namely the relative length of
Ottoman domination. Thus it may be that Northern Greece has more Turkisms
because it has been under the influence of the Athenian standard for a
SHORTER period of time (roughly half a century), and not so much because it
was under the Turks for so LONG. Moreover, it is precisely in those parts of
Greece which were annexed in the 20th century that Turkish colonization and
the non-Turkish Moslem population (Albanian, Greek, etc.) were concentrated.
A further factor is surely that the bulk of Greek refugees from Turkey were
resettled in parts of Northern Greece. Those people, who left Turkey in the
early 1920's, were largely bilingual, and their Greek was full of Turkish
elements. A good number of them were even monolingual speakers of Turkish —
it was mainly their Greek Orthodox religion that made them 'Greek'. To
return to the relative length of the Turkish occupation, it should be
pointed out that the number of Turkisms is large in Montenegro (Skok 1935,
p. 251) and also considerable in Slavonia (lvić 1958, p. 299) — both these
regions were under the Turks for a relatively short time.

91

rather about those Turkish elements which replaced or joined perfectly good
native terms or expressions. Unfortunately, it is far beyond the scope of
this paper to try to answer this question in any detail. I shall therefore
limit myself to a few remarks, which moreover contain little that is new.
According to Škaljić (1966, pp. 12-13), the great number of Turkisms in
Serbocroatian was due to the following factors: the presence of Turkish
military and administrative personnel; the influence of native Moslems, some
of whom studied in Constantinople (also Skok 1937-1938, p. 174); the
diffusion of folk songs (and oral literature in general), which were full of
words and expressions of Oriental origin — see also Knežević 1962, p. 5;
Skok 1935, pp. 251, 255, and 1937-1938, pp. 171-172, 174; Hazai 1961, pp.
116-117; Vranska 1952, pp. 220-222. On the other hand, Hazai (1961, pp.
99-100, 114-116) sees a particularly important factor in the intense
colonization of certain areas with Turkish-speaking settlers, to the extent
that Turkish became the dominant language in a large part of the territory —
see also İnalcik 1966, p. 28.

Correct as Hazai's observation undoubtedly is, it still does not explain, I
think, the great inroads that Turkish made even in those regions where there
were virtually no Turks, other than soldiers and administrators. The answer
is probably that Turkish, the official language of the Ottoman Empire,
enjoyed considerable prestige among non-Turkish speakers, irrespective of
their religion — Hazai 1961, pp. 100, 115; inalcik 1966, p. 33.
[12]
The factor of prestige is closely related to that of fashion, which is
probably one of the most important causes of lexical replacement:
oversimplifying a bit, we can say that many older words are partly or wholly
replaced by new ones, because they have become old-fashioned. It is highly
plausible that Osmanli Turkish constituted a favorite source of replacements
or (near-)synonyms for native Balkan words. It was a language with which a
good number of non-Turks were more or less familiar and moreover it was a
prestigious language.

As
was to be expected, Turkish linguistic influence came to a standstill ufter
the liberation of the various Balkan nations — Skok 1935, p. 252. It is,
however, somewhat of a surprise to hear Skok (1935, p. 251) say

that
he knows of no puristic tendencies in the Balkans directed against Turkisms,
the reason being that the latter allegedly began to disappear as it were by
themselves. To be sure, most of the Turkish terminology that had to do with
official Ottoman institutions, such as the army, the administration, the
monetary system, Moslem law, and so on, was replaced during the first
decades following the establishment of the national states. Most of those
terms, which we can call for short "administrative Turkisms", are by now
historical words, used, for example, in order to lend a more authentic
flavor to historical accounts or works of fiction dealing with 'the time of
the Turks'. As we know, however, Turkish loanwords in the Balkan languages
extended to many other semantic domains as well. A good many such
'non-administrative' Turkisms were no doubt eliminated from the various
languages more or less spontaneously, as the objects, trades, etc. to which
they referred ceased to exist, and also as a result of the gradual
development of education and the new orientation of the Balkan
intelligentsia towards Western Europe and sometimes also towards Russia —
Skok 1935, p. 252; Mirčev 1952, p. 121 and passim. But this should in no way
mislead us into believing that no DELIBERATE efforts were made at the same
time to rid the Balkan languages of their Turkisms. It may well be that
Skok's assertion to that effect (1935, p. 251) is correct with respect to
Serbo-croatian, [13] but it is emphatically incorrect as
far as the other Balkan languages are concerned.

We
are not, of course, including here Macedonian, which was not proclaimed one
of the national languages of Yugoslavia until 1944, a decade after the
publication of Skok's article (1935). But, with the

13. Cf. Knežević 1962, pp. 6-7. According to Mirčev
(1952, pp. 121-122), Turkisms were eliminated much more rapidly from
Bulgarian than they were from Serbocroatian. He explains this by referring
to the relative influence of Russian on those two languages. That influence
began to be felt in Bulgaria and in Serbia at approximately the same time,
but it had much greater force and lasted much longer in the former. Skok
himself in a later work (1937-1938, p. 175), makes a much less sweeping
statement than the one in his 1935 article: he writes that Serbocroatian
purists have never turned against Turkisms WITH THE SAME VEHEMENCE with
which they attacked other foreignisms, such as Germanisms or Italianisms. My
colleague Dr. Ranko Bugarski, of the University of Belgrade, tells me that
to his knowledge Serbian purists have never waged a campaign against
Turkisms, but that some Croatian purists have occasionally done so. As an
example of the latter, he mentioned the article "Turcizmi se sire"
('Turkisms are spreading') in Jonke 1965, pp. 405-407. See also
Hämeen-Anttila 1963, p. 230. It would have been interesting to compare the
status of Turkisms in the two basic variants of the Serbocroatian language
(cf. Magner 1967, pp. 336-338), but unfortunately such a comparison lies
beyond my field of competence.

3

establishment of the Macedonian literary language, purism set in there too—
Koneski 1965, p. 188. [14]

In
the other four linguistic communities with which we are concerned (Albanian,
Bulgarian, Greek, and Rumanian), there definitely were vigorous puristic
movements directed against Turkisms, as well as against some other types of
foreign linguistic elements. [15] The efforts to 'purify'
the Balkan languages of their Turkish elements began even before the
liberation of the various countries. This was done in conjunction with the
national renaissance movements which accompanied the awakening of the Balkan
peoples to national consciousness — Skendi 1967, p. 123; Skok 1935, pp.
251-252. It is interesting to note that in Albania, the only Balkan country
with a Moslem majority (about 70%), it was not only or even mostly Christian
intellectuals who participated in the purge of Turkisms, but Moslem ones as
well — Bulka 1957, p. 206; Skendi 1967, pp. 123, 143.

Probably the most ferocious puristic movement in the Balkans was that which
was launched in Greece. The first period following the establishment of the
Greek state in the 1830's was characterized by a gradual shift of the
written language in the direction of Attic Greek, a trend which continued
until roughly the turn of the century — Triantaphyllidēs 1938, pp. 96 ff. ;
Skok 1936, pp. 473-475. Moreover, the puristic or learned variety of Greek,
katharevousa, which had been used by the Greek intelligentsia throughout
the duration of Ottoman rule, had remained virtually free of Turkisms — Skok
1935, p. 252. [16]

At
the present moment, the battle against Turkisms has subsided considerably in
those parts of the Balkans where the standard language has had more time to
establish itself. Puristic campaigns are, however, still going on in
Albania, a country which was under Ottoman rule until the second decade of
this century and whose population is largely Moslem. [17]

14. Cf. also some puristic and prescriptive remarks in
Markov 1955, p. 161. Gołąb (1959, p. 44) speaks of "the anti-Turkish
tendency in the newly-created literary Macedonian" and expresses the view
that "the creators and codifiers of this language ... are endeavouring to
limit the number of the old Turkish loan-words in the literary language".

Something similar may still be true of Yugoslav Macedonia, which also remained
in the Ottoman Empire until quite late (1912), has a considerable
Turkish-speaking population, [18] and whose dominant
language, Macedonian, has enjoyed the status of a literary language for only
a quarter of a century — cf. Gołąb 1959, p. 44.

Although puristic norms are easier to introduce in the written language, they
can also have considerable impact on the spoken language as well. To what
extent the latter is being influenced by the written language depends on
such factors as the rate of literacy, the ready availability of
communication media, [19] and the like. The Balkan
languages were no exception to this, even though as we shall see the
surviving Turkisms are admittedly both more numerous and more frequent in
the spoken standard and in written styles purporting to reproduce speech
than they are in the written language in general.

The
spontaneous falling into disuse, for one reason or another, of a number of
Turkisms, as well as deliberate puristic campaigns, were responsible for the
fact that the various standard languages in the Balkans have today far fewer
Turkisms than they had as late as a few decades ago — Koneski 1965, pp.
187-188; Krajni 1965, pp. 148, 149; Mirčev 1952, p. 125; Graur 1967, p. 56.
[20]

19. Not only books and the press, but also such 'spoken'
media as the radio and television are instrumental in spreading the written
language, since their programs consist partly in reading aloud written
texts.

20. Stojkov (1952, p. 168) says that earlier literary
works in Bulgarian are partly unintelligible today, because of their heavy
use of Turkisms which are no longer current. The same can be said of the
other languages as well. Sometimes glossaries are needed to translate less
well-known words, including a fair number of obsolete Turkisms. For
instance, we find such glossaries in Karadžić 1937 and in Folklor
shqiptar 1963. We thus have a reversal of the 19th-century situation
where some terms used as replacements of popular Turkisms were so little
understood by the average reader that the authors would often gloss them
with their Turkish equivalents, which were much better known — Koneski 1965,
p. 187; Makedonska 1952, pp. 223-224; Bronsert 1968, pp. 94-95. Cf. also
Mirčev 1952, p. 124.

95

Turkish elements left in the Balkan languages. The avoidance and replacement
in higher styles of a number of Turkisms in each language did not
necessarily push them OUT of the language. In many cases it simply meant
that they were pushed DOWN stylistically, that they were 'demoted' as it
were — Bronsert 1968, pp. 98-99 and passim. But even what we have
called the 'retreat' of Turkisms has not been without a few exceptions : in
some instances there has actually been a territorial expansion of Turkisms.
This was the case in those formerly Austro-Hungarian territories annexed by
Rumania and Yugoslavia after World War I. [21] The
prestige of the Muntenian-based literary language in Rumania and that of the
Belgrade standard in Yugoslavia helped spread a good number of Turkisms to
the Western regions of both countries — Skok 1937-1938, p. 175, also 1935,
p. 252. [22]
The spread of Turkisms to those regions was of course intimately connected
with the diffusion of cultural elements, such as for example sevdàlīnke
'(Moslem) love songs (or poems)' (cf. Turkish sevda 'love, etc.') and
ćevàpčići 'hachis de viande roulée et grillée' (cf. Turkish kebab
'roast meat') in the Serbocroatian linguistic domain — I owe this remark to
Professor Pavle Ivić.

Another important instance of Turkisms actually spreading occurred in Greece —
Kapetanakēs 1962, p. 7. As a result of the exchange of populations between
Greece and Turkey which began in 1923, about 1,300,000 Greeks emigrated to
Greece. Those refugees from Turkey imported a large number of Turkisms, some
of which found their way into at least the passive (receptive) vocabulary of
part of the remaining population. This happened both directly, through
personal contact with refugees, and indirectly, through reading.
[23] The refugees would use some Turkish loanwords so consistently that
the non-refugees would end up by learning their meaning. Then there was the
influence of lighter literary genres, like the causerie, the funny column,
and so on. I think I

21. We are obviously not including here Bosnia and
Herzogovina, which were placed under Austria-Hungary only after the Congress
of Berlin (1878). Skok (1935, p. 255) Skok (1935, p. 255) says that some
Turkisms did not become pan-Serbocroatian until after the establishement of
the Yugoslav state.

22. This of course does not mean that Turkisms had
formerly been entirely absent from those regions: cf. Skok 1935, p. 251, and
1937-1938, p. 174; Ivić 1958, p. 299. Rosetti and Cazacu (1961, p. 336) say
that the few Turkish elements formerly found in the language of Western
Rumania penetrated indirectly either via the old Principalities or through
the intermediary of Hungarian. Šăineanu (1900, p. 280) writes that Turkisms
penetrated the Banat dialects of Rumanian through a Serbian or Hungarian
intermediary — see also ibid., p. 269.

23. I don't know whether any similar phenomena occurred
after the arrival and resettlement in Greece in recent years of a large
number of Constantinople Greeks.

96

speak
for many Greeks when I say that I learned literally dozens of Turkisms,
including greetings, polite formulae, exclamations, and curses, by reading
as a child in the 1940's such things as the monologues of Eftalia, an
imaginary woman from Smyrna and possibly one of the funniest mahalle
karıları
(gossips, commères) of all times, and those of Karabet, the Armenian
shlimazl, [24] in the columns of the popular weekly
Θησαυρός. There must also have been some plays based, at least partly, on
the deviant speech habits of the refugees, but I do not know of any actual
instances.

Until
now we have been using the term Turkism' almost as if it referred
exclusively to loanwords. Although the influence of Turkish on the Balkan
languages has indeed been particularly strong in the domain of the lexicon,
it was far from restricted to it. In fact, one could almost speak of 'overt'
and 'covert' Turkisms, even though there is obviously no well-defined
boundary between the two types. It goes without saying that covert Turkisms
(and covert foreignisms in general) stand a much better chance of passing
undetected by purists.

Overt
Turkisms would be essentially the loanwords, but even here one might ask:
overt for whom? — cf. Mirčev 1952, p. 127. There are many lexical items
whose Turkish origin may or may not be transparent, depending on such things
as how educated a given native speaker is, whether or not he has ever
dabbled in etymology, whether he knows Turkish and how well, and so on.

Possibly overt Turkisms are the very numerous Balkan idiomatic expressions,
greeting formulae, sayings, and proverbs borrowed from Turkish and
containing one or more lexical Turkisms — some of the latter are never (or
very rarely) used outside of such expressions: cf. Thomaj 1965, pp. 172-173;
Dimitrescu 1958, pp. 171-172. However, a considerable number of Turkish
idiomatic expressions, formulae, etc. have been wholly translated into
native terms, so that few people today would suspect their Turkish origin.
Linguists have tended to underestimate the role of Turkish in the creation
of the common phraseological

24. Armenian refugees, often monolingual in Turkish upon
their arrival in Greece, were an even more favorite target. Besides using a
tremendous number of Turkisms in their Greek, they also systematically
mistreated Greek grammar and phonology.

97

stock
shared by the Balkan languages [25] — Jašar-Nasteva
1962-1963, pp. 114 ff. Papahagi (1908) does list the Turkish equivalents of
some of his parallele Ausdrücke (e.g., on pp. 145, 154-155), but not
nearly often enough. The Yugoslav linguist Olivera Jašar-Nasteva has written
a valuable article (1962-1963) [26] where we find many
Macedonian examples of such expressions, formulae, etc., partly or wholly
tranlsated from Turkish, neatly classified and supplemented with their
equivalents in other Balkan languages. Thus, the Macedonian expression od
kade na kade? 'why?, for what reason?, apropos of what?, etc' (literally
'from where to where?') is modelled on Turkish nereden nereye 'for
some reason or other; I don't quite know why' (gloss from Hony 1957) —
Jašar-Nasteva 1962-1963, p. 143. Cf. also Bulgarian ot kədé nakədé?,
Greek ἀπο ποῦ κι ὤς ποῦ; and Rumanian de unde pînă
unde?

At
least as covert as these so-called "loan-translations" [27]
are the semantic calques (alias "loan-shifts" [28]), where
the meaning of a native word is extended so as to include some secondary
meaning of its foreign (here Turkish) counterpart. Thus the Macedonian word
pat 'road' has also acquired the meaning 'time' (as in three times, many
times), supposedly under the influence of Turkish yol, which means
both 'road' and 'time' — Jašar-Nasteva 1962-1963, p. 125; note that
Bulgarian
pət and Serbocroatian pût behave in exactly the same way.

All
those types of Turkisms have left indelible, if mostly unobtrusive, marks on
the phraseology and the semantics of the Balkan languages. This does not
mean, however, that all of those Turkisms have today the same stylistic
value everywhere in the Balkans. Some of them have remained in the dialects
or at the level of folk (substandard) speech, or else have been
stylistically demoted to it — they are not normally used by speakers of the
standard language except to achieve a specific effect,

26. See especially her conclusions (pp. 170-172), which,
although they are meant to apply only to Macedonian, are largely valid for
the remaining languages as well. It is not always possible to ascertain
whether the source of a given item was indeed Turkish — Jašar-Nasteva
1962-1963, p. 118. In some cases it might have been Greek (the other Balkan
language with the greatest amount of prestige; Koneski 1965, p. 182) or even
some third language, not to mention the possibility of spontaneous parallel
creations (Dimitrescu 1958, p. 161).

27. For an excellent discussion of the various types of
linguistic borrowing, see Haugen 1950.

for
instance for facetious purposes. An example of a calque on Turkish which has
different stylistic values in different languages are the expressions
modelled on Turkish tütün içmek 'to smoke', literally 'to drink
tobacco' — cf. also sigara içmek 'to smoke a cigarette' and pipo
içmek 'to smoke the pipe'. Its Albanian equivalent, pi duhan, is
as far as I know the only way to express this particular sense of 'to smoke'
in the standard language. In Greek, on the other hand, πίνω τσιγάρο,
literally 'to drink cigarette', is substandard: standard speakers say
καπνίζω. [29]
Macedonian pie cigari seems to be somewhere in between: Jašar-Nasteva
(1962-1963, p. 148) says that LATELY (emphasis added) it is the verb puši
'to smoke' that is used more frequently. The latter probably sounds more
'dignified' and less 'balkanoid' to educated Macedonians ('balkanoid' in the
sense of semi-Oriental, backward, etc.), a process which Greek may have also
gone through at some earlier stage.

Before we return to loanwords and try to make some generalizations on the
stylistic categories to which they belong, let us examine some other
vestiges of Turkish linguistic influence on the Balkan languages.

Let
us begin with the domain of grammar. Any influence that Turkish may have had
on the grammar of the Balkan languages is covert. We probably still know too
little to be able to ascertain the extent of that influence — Skok
1937-1938, p. 170. There is, however, general agreement that the impact of
Turkish on the domains of morphology and syntax was much less significant
than its impact on the lexicon — Sandfeld 1930, p. 159; Hazai 1961, p. 102.
The most frequently cited instance of Turkish grammatical influence in the
Balkans is that of the development of the category of 'reportedness' in the
verbal system of some forms of East South Slavic, including standard
Bulgarian and standard Macedonian — Bernstein 1968, p. 78; Gołąb 1959, p.
34; Hazai 1961, p. 102; Koneski 1965, p. 147; Mirčev 1952, p. 118; and 1963,
pp. 83-84.[30]
These two languages, just like Turkish, distinguish between processes

29. This is obviously calqued on Western European: French
fumer, Italian fumare (cf. also folksy Greek ϕουμάρω and
ϕουμέρνω, German rauchen, English to smoke, etc. Cf. also
Bulgarian puša and Serbocroatian pȕ
šiti.

30. Mirčev (1952, p. 118) and Koneski (1965, pp. 146-148)
also mention some other, less important, instances of possible Turkish
grammatical influence on Bulgarian and Macedonian, respectively. Koneski
(ibid.) also mentions that the same grammatical category is found at an
embryonic stage also in some Albanian city dialects (in Macedonia?), where
the influence of Turkish has been strongest.

If it
is true, as it most probably is, that it was Turkish that served as the
model for Bulgarian and Macedonian in this respect, then we have here a
remarkable instance of linguistic influence, one that presupposes widespread
bilingualism at some time in the past and which will surely prove to be one
of the most durable marks left by Turkish on the Balkan languages.

Turkish influence on the sound system of the standard Balkan languages has
been minimal. [31] The main vestiges left by Turkish on
standard Balkan phonology are indirect ones, namely an increase in the
frequency of occurrence of some sounds, such as the sound [dʒ͡]
[32] in Albanian, Rumanian, and the South Slavic languages
with which we are concerned. That happened because those languages adopted
Turkish words and suffixes containing that sound. [33]
Rumanian, of course, already had that sound in words inherited from Latin,
such as ginere 'son-in-law', genunchi 'knee', a trage
'to pull', etc. But not even for the other languages would it be correct to
say that [dʒ͡]
was first introduced along with Turkish lexical elements. It already
occurred in all those languages as a voiced positional variant of the sound
[ t ʃ ͡],
[34] as the result of voicing assimilation :

The
dialects on which standard Modern Greek is based lack palato-alveolar
consonants — like [ʃ],
[ t ʃ ͡],
[dʒ͡],
etc. Such sounds are generally replaced in loanwords by their alveolar
counterparts. To the [ʒd͡]
of Albanian xham, Bulgarian and Macedonian džam, Rumanian
geam, and Serbocroatian džȁm,
corresponds the [dz͡]
[35] of Greek τζάμι (Turkish cam 'glass'). Thus in
the case of Greek it was the frequency of the ALVEOLAR voiced affricate
which increased as a result of the importation of Turkish elements into the
language.

Similarly, the adoption in Albanian and Bulgarian of a great many Turkish
words containing the vowel ı (which ranges from [ɯ]
to [ɨ])
increased the frequency of the schwa ([ə]) in those two languages — [ə] is
spelled ë and ъ in Albanian and Bulgarian respectively. (I am
grateful to E. P. Hamp for this remark.) The same could be said of the
frequency of Rumanian î [ɨ],
which is phonetically quite close to Turkish ı.

A
domain where the passage of the Turks through the Balkans has left deep
marks is that of names, both anthroponyms and toponyms. As far as personal
names go, we shall be concerned only with family names (surnames). Given
names are often of a rather ephemeral nature and tend to change with
fashions — and, besides, given names of Turkish origin are found almost
exclusively among Balkan Moslems. On the other hand, we find a great many
surnames of Turkish origin even among the Christian population. As a rule,
such names consist of a Turkish root accompanied by one or more native
suffixes : for example, Albanian Kazazi (Turkish kaz(z)az 'silk
manufacturer'), Bulgarian
Terziev (Turkish terzi 'tailor'), Greek Ζορμπάς (Turkish zorba 'who
uses force; rebel; bully'), Macedonian Džambazov (Turkish cambaz
'acrobat; circus-rider; horsedealer; swindler'), Rumanian Ceauşescu
(Turkish çavuş 'sergeant; doorkeeper; messenger; uniformed attendant
(of an ambassador or consul)'), Serbian Čorović (Turkish kör
'blind') — see also Boissin 1965, pp. 181-182.

Some
Balkan surnames were originally compounds whose first member is a Turkish
word (by now very close to being a Balkan 'prefix') like hacı 'one
who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca (or to the Holy Land, as in the case of
Christians); hadji; pilgrim', kara 'black; gloomy; ill-omened',
deli
'crazy; wild', and perhaps a few others: for example, Albanian Haxhihasani,
Serbian Karađordević, Macedonian Xadživasilev, Greek
Χατζηχρῆστος and Ντεληγιάννης — Ντελη- has very often been 'hellenized' into
Δελη-; see below.

Turkish surnames being overt evidence of foreign linguistic and cultural
influence, many of them did not escape the 'hellenizing' tendencies which
began in Greece already at the beginning of the 19th century —
Triantaphyllidēs 1963b, p. 267. Thus, names like Μπεκρῆς (Turkish bekri
'habitual drunkard'), Μπέης (Turkish bey 'gentleman, etc.'), Σαρίπογλου
(Turkish şarib 'hopeless drunkard' and oǧlu
'son of, -son'), were often changed into Βεκρῆς, Βέης, Σαρίπολος.

Then
there are the numerous Turkish place-names. Those would normally be rather
durable vestiges of Turkish influence or sometimes even of actual Turkish
settlements, were it not for the fact that toponyms change so often —
Kissling 1965, p. 141. [36] Thus, a Bulgarian village to
which Evliya Çelebi refers as Rumlar ('Greeks' in Turkish) is called
today Gərci
('Greeks' in Bulgarian) — ibid., p. 142. In the case of Greece
specifically, the hellenization of Turkish and other foreign place-names
assumed gigantic proportions — Triantaphyllidēs 1938, pp. 570-579, 595-596;
Georgacas and McDonald 1967, pp. 10-11.

Some
Turkish names for places outside the Balkans had also been adopted in
certain Balkan languages. I hope I am not making too sweeping a
generalization when I say that most of those seem to have disappeared by now
from the standard variety of each language. Thus the present range of Greek
Μισίρι 'Egypt' (Turkish Misir) is very restricted: we may find it,
for example, in folk tales and folk songs, both traditional and of the
ρεμπέτικο (bouzouki) type, or in artistic literature, both prose and poetry,
for instance when a writer wishes to create an atmosphere of the past or to
convey the idea of exoticity — the historical

and
poetic term Μισίρι certainly sounds more exotic and possibly even more
distant in space than its stylistically neutral counterpart, Αἴγυπτος. In
Albanian, I think, things are a bit different, at least in Moslem usage.
Although the neologism Egjipti is probably more common today, one
still hears educated speakers refer to Misir. As far as I can tell,
the same can be said of the pair Aleksandri/Skënderi 'Alexandria'
(Turkish
İskenderiye).

In
all Balkan languages, a number of Turkish suffixes were isolated from
loanwords and began to be used with non-Turkish stems. [37]
With few exceptions, it was essentially the same Turkish suffixes that became
productive in all the languages. The most important of these suffixes were
probably -ci (/ci/cü/cu/çi/çı/çü/çu), -li (/lı/lü/lu),
and -lik (/lik/lük/luk). [38] We are often
told either that these suffixes have acquired a deprecating overtone,
[39] or that their use in a given standard language is today
limited, [40] or that they are no longer productive.
[41] True as such statements mostly are, we would still like
to know a bit more about the fate of each suffix in each individual
language, before we can begin to make generalizations about all the Balkan
languages. For example, in an important article (1958, pp. 59-60), Werner
Bahner shows clearly how contradictory the reports given by various Rumanian
linguists can be, when it comes to deciding whether or not the suffix -giu
(Turkish -ci) is still productive in Rumanian.

One
obvious way of trying to fill the many gaps in our knowledge would be to do
for each suffix in each language what Bahner did for the

37. This is a case of lexical, not grammatical, borrowing
— Deroy 1956, pp. 73, 77. Cf. also Šăineanu 1900, p. 52. The Balkan
languages must have first borrowed a number of Turkish nouns ending, say, in
the suffix -ci, before they finally isolated that suffix and in their
turn created new formations, with -ci attached to non-Turkish stems,
as in Albanian
karrocaxhi 'cabman, coachman', Rumanian laptagiu 'milkman',
Serbo-croatian govòrdžija 'chatterer, babbler', etc. Even so we
cannot always be sure that the new words are entirely original: in some
cases they may be partial translations ("loan-blends": Haugen 1950, pp. 215,
218-219) of a Turkish model.

38. The suffixes are given here in their Turkish forms,
including the Turkish variants whose use depends on vowel harmony or voicing
assimilation. For the sake of simplicity, I will henceforth refer to Turkish
suffixes by their high front (voiced) variant, namely -lik, -li,
and -ci.

39. Graur 1967, p. 65. It is only fair to mention,
though, that, apropos of the suffix -giu (Turkish -cí). Graur exempts
"a few trade names such as cazangui ‘boiler’smith’" from such a
characterization.

suffix -giu in Rumanian. He examined the productivity of that suffix in
each of its main functions: his conclusion was that -giu is
productive in contemporary Rumanian only as a pejorative suffix, although
even in that function there had not been, as of 1958, any new formations for
some time — Bahner 1958, p. 63.

An
impressionistic judgment (faute de mieux) on the state of affairs in
Greek would yield very similar results — see also Triantaphyllidēs 1963a,
pp. 91-94. To the extent that it is at all productive, the suffix -τζής
(Turkish -ci) is productive only in its function as a pejorative
suffix. [42]
The same is true of the suffix –λίκι (Turkish -lik), except that the
latter is definitely productive in my own idiolect. It helps form nouns
referring to different official posts or functions, and it always has a
mildly ironical overtone. Here are some of the new formations with - λίκι
that I have used in recent years: κοσμητοριλίκι 'deanship', ἐπιμελητιλίκι
'assistantship', and the Anglo-Turco-Hellenic hybrids ἀσισταντ(ι)λίκι
(ditto) and τσε(α)ρμαν(ι)λίκι 'chairmanship'. On the other hand, the suffix
–λής (Turkish -li) appears to be non-productive in the contemporary
standard language.

Mirčev (1952, p. 118) says that derivatives with the
suffixes -džija and -lək (Turkish -ci and --lik)
in Bulgarian have now a definitely ironical, derisive, or pejorative
connotation. Standing on Bahner's shoulders as we are, we may wonder whether
the 'real' meaning of that statement is not that the situation in Bulgarian
is the same as in Rumanian and Greek: at least in the case of -džija,
maybe the only function of the suffix that strikes the Bulgarian observer is
its more or less productive one, which also happens to be its pejorative
one. For when we look at Bulgarian -džija as a suffix forming
nomina agentis referring to traditional trades (Berufe, not
Ämter), we find a good number of nouns that do not, as far as I know,
have the least pejorative shade of meaning: bojadžija 'dyer;
house-painter',
xandžija 'inn-keeper; landlord; host', xalvadžija 'manufacturer of
halvah; dealer in halvah', kafedžija 'owner/keeper of a coffeehouse',
[43]džamdžija 'glazier', and so on. Incidentally,
Professor Boris

42. I am not aware, however, of any new formations with
τζης in recent years. Concerning the potentially pejorative nature of -ci
in Turkish, see Bahner 1958, p. 60, and Spitzer 1936, pp. 124-125.

Kremenliev of the University of California at Los
Angeles, a native speaker of Bulgarian, insists that -džija is still
productive in Bulgarian, albeit with an ironical etc. connotation. He cited
the recent (American Bulgarian?) formation kompjuterdžíja
'computerologist' and he kept referring to this writer jokingly as
balkandžíja 'balkanologist'.

Stachowski (1961, pp. 27, 43, 56) says with respect to
the suffixes -džija, -lija, and -luk in Serbocroatian that
none of them is productive in the contemporary language, whereas Professor
Pavle Ivić tells me that this is not true of -džija, which in his
view is still productive but again with an ironical etc. connotation.

For
Macedonian, we are fortunate to have in Markov 1955 a fairly detailed study
of what he calls "hybrid creations" (xibridni tvorbi; "loan-blends"
in Haugen 1950, pp. 215, 218-219), namely combinations of originally Turkish
suffixes with non-Turkish stems, as in gotovadžija 'seller of
ready-made clothes' (cf. Turkish hazırcı), vojniklak 'military
service' (Turkish askerlık), bradalija 'bearded man' (Turkish
sakallı). Markov's verdict (1955, p. 158) is that all suffixes of Turkish
origin have ceased to be productive in Macedonian, whereas Koneski, ten
years later (1965, p. 189), writes that both -džija and -lak
are productive in the contemporary language, but that new formations with
them, like filmadžija and festivaldžija, have a derisive,
ironical, etc. overtone.

Unfortunately, I have no information on whether or not these suffixes are
still productive in Albanian.

But
we are not merely concerned with the question of how productive these
suffixes are in the different languages. We would also like to know
something about the status of the words which end in them. The one
synchronie study available to me which tries to deal with that question is
Markov 1955. Let us try to see whether we can make some tentative
generalizations about all the Balkan languages on the basis of Markov's
conclusions with respect to Macedonian. In his view, the suffixes in
question are both better represented and more frequent in the colloquial
language (vo razgovorniot jazik) and the dialects than they are in
the literary language (vo literaturniot jazik) — 1955, pp. 154, 157,
159, and passim.

It is
important to point out that the colloquial language constantly referred to
by Markov is by no means necessarily opposed to what we have called "the
standard language", namely the speech of educated persons, which also
includes colloquial styles — cf. p. 88, above. Note further that if Markov
had wanted to exclude the STANDARD colloquial he could have used some other
term, such as "popular/folk language",

105

as
does Koneski: vo našiot naroden jazik (1965, p. 101 and passim)
— see also some relevant remarks in Dimitrescu 1958, p. 149. But perhaps
Markov's "literary language" and our "standard language" are not
coterminous: maybe his use of "literary language" excludes the colloquial
(or familiar, or casual) ranges of what we have called "standard language" —
it may not be entirely fortuitous that, in an otherwise descriptive article,
Markov also indulges in some prescriptive suggestions (1955, p. 161).

We
can therefore venture the statement that the Macedonian situation is
probably a miniature copy of what is going on in the remaining languages
too: words formed with the suffixes -ci, -li, and -lik are
particularly frequent in colloquial speech, but are frowned upon in more
elevated spoken and written styles. [44] There are of
course exceptions: in some instances, such words are perfectly good,
stylistically neutral elements of even the literary language. It seems to me
that Albanian budallallëk
is a case in point. The Fjalor anglisht-shqip (1966) lists it as the
only gloss under the entry stupidity (although I think that the non-Turkism
marrëzi would have also been correct), just as it lists only budalla
(Turkish budala 'silly fool; imbecile') under stupid. On the
other hand, it is most likely that the present trend will continue in all
languages: as the new terms from the literary language penetrate the lower
styles of the standard colloquial (through books, the press, radio, etc.),
more words with those Turkish suffixes will become obsolete or else will be
stylistically demoted. Some types of words will probably be spared such a
fate, for instance those which refer to traditional trades — provided of
course the trades themselves survive: cf. Bahner 1958, pp. 62-63. As a rule,
the literary language does not bother with ϕαναρτζῆδες (plural of Greek
ϕαναρτζής 'lamp-maker; tinsmith') or with παγωτατζῆδες (plural of παγωτατζής
'ice-cream vendor'), except in some legal or administrative documents, which
have little impact on the spoken standard. Other words likely to be spared
obsolescence for some time are those dealing with everyday notions, such as
human types, like Greek καταϕερτζής 'one with a knack of succeeding',
μερακλής 'one who demands and relishes the best; one who loves to do a job
well' (Turkish meraklı 'curious; interested in, fond of; anxious') —
both these words belong to the lowest ranges of the

44. We may mention parenthetically that Macedonian,
because of well-known historical reasons, appears to have still a great
number of words (straight loanwords as well as loanblends) with the suffixes
in question — greater, say, than standard Athenian Greek. At least that is
my impression after reading Markov (1955) and Koneski (1965 and 1966).

106

standard colloquial. The literary language is not usually concerned with these
either, so any alternatives it may propose for them will probably remain at
the more elevated stylistic levels, to which such terms do not belong
anyway.

Our
last task will be to examine surviving Turkish loanwords in the Balkan
languages from the viewpoint of their present stylistic status. In the first
place we find those Turkisms which have become fully naturalized (Skok 1935,
p. 252; Škaljić 1966, p. 15) in the various languages and which are
stylistically neutral. By "stylistically neutral" we mean that they can be
used in any spoken or written style without giving any clues as to the
speaker's or writer's social background or level of education, and also
without betraying any intention on his part to achieve a specific stylistic
effect, such as irony, contempt, humor, exoticity, solemnity, and the like.
In the case of nouns, those Turkisms refer mostly, but not exclusively, to
concrete objects, [45] such as the various words which
reflect Turkish çanta 'bag; case; valise; knapsack',
[46]çorab 'stocking', [47] and kibrit 'match'
[48] — but cf. also Rumanian duşman 'enemy' (Turkish
düşman) and leafă 'salary' (Turkish ulûfe '(formerly) the
pay of a soldier for the fodder of his horse').

Škaljić (1966, p. 15) divides such words into those for
which there exist other alternatives in a given language and those for which
there are no such alternatives. [49] For example,
čàrapa
is the only word for 'stocking' in standard Serbocroatian, whereas òdžak
'chimney' (Turkish ocak) has

45. This category of nouns is by no means restricted to
such things as are specifically Turco-Oriental, such as some dishes, kitchen
utensils, musical instruments, and the like — for examples, see Škaljić
1966, p. 15.

46. Albanian çantë, Bulgarian čanta, Greek
τσαντα, Macedonian čanta, Rumanian geantă. These do not always
cover exactly the same semantic range, but the basic idea is everywhere the
same.

49. Sometimes the 'standard' Serbocroatian equivalents of
loanwords are, according to Bidwell (1968, p. 403), "bookish words not used
(or perhaps not even known) by many indisputably standard speakers (e.g.
smočnica 'pantry' for špajza). This points up the fact mentioned by
Magner (52) that, in many semantic spheres of everyday life, Serbo-Croatian
simply lacks a standard vocabulary in common use; the various regional
colloquial koines use items (usually from German, Italian, Turkish, or
Greek) rejected for one or another reason by the puristic normativists".

107

at
least one synonym in the standard language, namely
dı̏mnjāk
— this does not necessarily mean that the territorial domains of these two
words coincide exactly. That so many Turkisms without synonyms can be found
in the basic vocabulary of the Balkan languages is a further indication of
the strong and durable nature of Turkish linguistic influence.

Although the list of such nouns is largely the same for each language, there
are sporadic differences from one language to another. I shall give here
some examples of how Greek differs from some of the other languages.
Contrary to what is going on in the other languages, τσο(υ)ράπι (Turkish
çorab) is not one hundred percent stylistically neutral in Greek. When
it is used to refer to manufactured stockings or socks, this is always done
ironically or with contempt. But even when it is used to refer to homemade
peasant woollen stockings there is often an overtone of irony or contempt —
after all city-dwellers consider themselves 'better' than villagers; cf. the
derivative τσουράπης in Athenian slang, meaning 'peasant lout, uncouth
peasant' (χωριάτησμ ἄχεστος, — Dagkitsēs 1967b). There are of course also
contexts where τσο(υ)ράπι is free of negative overtones. Such are, for
instance, the contexts which we can call "historical" and "ethnographic". To
give an example of the latter kind, in a sentence like Κατεβαίνουν οἱ
Σαρακατσάνισσες, μέ τά πολύχρωμα τσουράπια τους, μέ ... 'the Sarakatsan
women are coming down, with their multicolored woollen stockings, with ...',
describing the attire of nomadic shepherd women, the word τσουράπια sounds
more 'authentic' than its stylistically neutral counterpart, κάλτσες.

Thus
what is a stylistically marked Turkism in one language may sometimes be
stylistically neutral in another. This occasionally causes misunderstandings
of an ethnocentric nature. One sometimes hears Greeks say things like : Do
you know how they say κάλτσες in Bulgarian? Τσουράπια. That clearly makes
the Greeks more refined than the uncouth, backward, 'balkanoid' Bulgarians
who use such peasant words as their normal ones. The Bulgarians could
retort, of course, by pointing out that, in the case of the word meaning
'stove (for room heating)', it is the Greeks who are being backward, etc. :
Greek uses σόμπα (Turkish soba 'stove; hothouse'), whereas standard
Bulgarian has
péčka in that meaning, the Turkism sóba being dialectal — at least
according to RBE.

Sometimes, what is a stylistically neutral word in one language does not even
exist in the contemporary standard variety of some other language. A case in
point is Turkish düşman 'enemy', whose reflex duşman is one of
the three common words for 'enemy' in Rumanian (the other two being
vrăjmaş
and the neologism inamic), but which is not

108

represented at all in standard Greek — there is a surname Δούσμανης, though.

Until
now we have mentioned only nouns as examples of stylistically neutral
Turkisms. Although nouns are undoubtedly by far more numerous, we also find
a number of adjectives, some verbs, and even a few adverbs and grammatical
words: for instance, Rumanian murdar 'dirty' (Turkish murdar,
mırdar), Bulgarian bojadísvam 'to color; to paint; to dye'
(Turkish boya
'dye; paint; color', boyamak 'to paint; to dye'), Macedonian bare
and barem and Serbocroatian bâr and bȁrem
'at least' (Turkish bari), [50] Bulgarian čak and
Serbocroatian čȁk
'even; as far as; until' (Turkish çak).

Before turning to stylistically marked Turkisms, I think we ought to mention a
peculiarity of Greek in connection with stylistically neutral ones. When we
refer to standard Modern Greek, we mean the spoken and written language of
educated people speaking and writing demotic (δημοτική). So, when we say
that παπούτσι 'shoe' (Turkish papuç, pabuç 'shoe; slipper') is
stylistically neutral, we do not necessarily mean thereby that it would also
be acceptable in katharevousa. The boundary between demotic and katharevousa
is at best a very fluid one, but there are plenty of clear-cut cases: anyone
saying or writing ὑποδήματα 'shoes' for παπούτσια is unmistakably using a
lexical element from katharevousa — demotic has borrowed a very large number
of words from katharevousa, [51] but ὑπόδημα is not one of
them, in the sense that it cannot be used as one of the normal words for
'shoe' in demotic.

At
the other extreme from stylistically neutral words, we find Turkisms
belonging to the category of 'historical' or 'obsolete' or at best 'poetic'
words. Here belong of course the terms which we have called 'administrative'
Turkisms, but also some other types of words. Let us have a brief look at
one broad semantic domain which was not left undisturbed by the official
language, namely that of warfare — taken here in its broadest possible
sense, and including not only weaponry, but also clothing, horsemanship, and
the like.

50. Čakalov et al. 1961 labels Bulgarian báre
(sic for baré) as "colloquial", and so does Ilkov et al. 1960
with baré and barém. Mirčev (1952, p. 126) says that it is
used in the literary language, but most of the time with a particular
stylistic tinge (v osobena stilna okraska).

51. In reading contemporary expository prose, written in
either demotic or katharevousa, we often notice that the majority of the
lexical items used are shared by both variants of Modern Greek, the main
differences between them being in the morphology and to a lesser extent in
the syntax. We are speaking of course of relatively simple (ἁπλή)
katharevousa, not of atticizing styles — which are extremely rare nowadays

109

'The
times of the Turks' were also heroic times. Many of the Turkish words that
had to do with the conduct of warfare evoke in the minds of Balkan readers
and listeners an era when 'fearless' haidouks and klephts were
fighting against 'the hated Turk'. The role of epic folk songs in this set
of associations can hardly be overestimated — Skok 1935, p. 255, and
1937-1938, p. 174; Škaljić 1966, p. 16; Triantaphyllidēs 1963a, p. 62. When
modern writers and orators try to recapture some of the heroic atmosphere of
those days, it is often from the folk songs that they draw their (largely
Turkish) epic vocabulary — consciously or unconsciously. Thus, in the right
context, a word like ἄτι 'steed, stallion' (Turkish at 'horse'),
which is at best poetic if not outright historical in standard Greek,
[52] is far more effective than the stylistically neutral and therefore
colorless ἄλογο.

Official Balkan military terminology has of course replaced a good number of
Turkisms. But the latter did not all become historical words thereby.
'Gunpowder' is still called μπαρούτι (Turkish barut) in standard
Greek, despite the rehellenized official term πυρῖτις of katharevousa.
[53] The same is true of the word for 'rifle', τουϕέκι (Turkish tüfek),
with respect to the 'hellenized' katharevousa form τυϕέκιον — see
Triantaphyllidēs 1963a, pp. 62-64, 131. In the other Balkan languages, where
there has been purism but not diglossia (Ferguson 1959), some Turkish terms
were adopted (without changes) in the official military terminology.
Examples are Albanian top 'gun, cannon' (Turkish top),
barut, fishek
'cartridge' (Turkish fişek), [54]saçmë (or
saçmá) 'small shot' (Turkish saçma), Bulgarian barút,
kuršúm 'lead; bullet' (Turkish kurşun 'lead; bullet; lead seal'),
fišék, sačmí, top (Mirčev 1952, p. 125), Serbocroatian bárut, sàčma, tȍp.

Since
the scope of this paper is restricted to the standard languages, we should
not, strictly speaking, deal with Turkisms whose range is limited to popular
(alias 'folk') speech. [55] However, because of the

52. I make this claim in spite of the fact that I have
yet to see a Modern Greek dictionary attach a stylistic label to that word.
For other examples, see Triantaphyllidēs 1963a, p. 62.

54. In Greek, ϕισέκι was 'hellenized' into ϕυσίγγιον —
Triantaphyllidēs 1963a, p. 131. The latter term has penetrated demotic and
has caused ϕισέκι to be somewhat demoted stylistically.

55. These terms, as used here, do not include the rural
dialects. They refer rather to what Haugen (1966, p. 32) has called "urban
substandard": "spoken by artisans and working-class people, varying from
city to city, but showing many characteristics in common with the
surrounding rural dialects". I am not sure that the last reference to "the
surrounding rural dialects" is always pertinent as far as the Balkans go.

110

quantitative importance ofthat subgroup of Turkisms, and also because of the
impact it has on the standard language, we shall devote a few remarks to it.
Balkan folk speech is extremely rich in Turkisms — Hristea 1958; Koneski
1965, pp. 101-102, 186ff.; Şăineanu 1900, p. 256. One need only leaf through
the dictionaries by K. Dagkitsēs (1967a and 1967b) and B. Kapetanakēs (1962)
to be convinced that this is at least the case in Greek. When Mirčev (1952,
p. 126) says that the use of Turkisms in Bulgarian gives a vulgar shade to
speech, he is really stating a pan-Balkan truth, provided we make it clear
that it is the folksy Turkisms of substandard speech that we have in mind
and not at all the stylistically neutral ones of the standard language. Of
equally pan-Balkan validity is also Mirčev's assertion that Turkisms are
numerous in slangy (argot) styles, as well as in the jargon used by
school children and students,
[56] but again with the same proviso. The use of such
Turkisms is regarded by adolescents (as well as by some adults) as 'manly'.
I don't know whether this is because they associate Turkisms with the
physically stronger and in their behavior more forthright manual laborers —
whom young people of other backgrounds often envy secretly. But the fact
remains that popular Turkisms contrast sharply with the supposedly somewhat
effete 'Frankish' (in the case of Greek, also exaggeratedly Hellenic)
[57] way of speaking.

I
don't pretend to know exactly where the boundary lies between so-called
'popular' language and the more familiar ranges of the standard colloquial.
But we know that standard speakers often cross that boundary, for instance
when they are completely uninhibited, in good spirits and among intimate
friends, and so on — see the short but excellent discussion in Dagkitsēs
1967b, p. 6. In Greece, the ρεμπέτικα type of songs, sung at bouzouki
joints and heard over the radio, have been instrumental in spreading
substandard Turkisms, so that many standard speakers at least know what they
mean. One Turkism that I personally learned in that fashion is σεβντάς
'love, heartache' (Turkish sevda 'melancholy; spleen; passion, love;
intense longing'). The writings of humorists or other writers describing
le milieu
(the underworld) are also important sources of diffusion for this category of
Turkisms — Dagkitsēs 1967b, p. 6; see also Mirčev 1952, p. 126.

56. Ibid. He goes on to make the prediction that
the use of Turkisms in Bulgarian will be further restricted as "the
linguistic culture" (ezikovata kultura) of the Bulgarian people
increases. Cf. also Andrejčin et al. (1964, p. 131) who urge Bulgarian
teachers to fight against slang.

57. Cf. the notion of ἑλληνικούρα, which Ioannidis (1961)
aptly translates into Russian as nenúžnyj arxaízm.

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Just
below the level of stylistically neutral Turkisms and above those belonging
to the folk language, are the Turkisms of the standard colloquial. The
emergence of new, more prestigious, and supposedly more dignified words has
reduced a number of formerly stylistically neutral Turkisms to the status of
colloquial words. Many of the latter refer to abstract notions, others to
concrete objects. They are used by educated speakers in relaxed or at least
unguarded situations, but are avoided in more elevated styles. Such are, for
example, Albanian bela, Bulgarian beljá, Greek μπελάς,
Macedonian
belja, [58] and Serbocroatian bèlāj
[59] (Turkish belâ), all of them roughly meaning 'trouble,
nuisance, misfortune, difficulty, etc.' Words belonging to this category are
so to speak mots du coeur — again an indication of how deeply
entrenched some Turkish elements have become in those languages. When an
educated Greek describes a quarrel to his family and friends, it is a καβγάς
(Turkish kavga 'tumult; brawl, quarrel; fight; battle') — only when
making a police report, or appearing before a magistrate, or the like, is he
likely to refer to it as a ϕιλονικεία. The latter word, which has
undoubtedly helped demote καβγάς to the level of colloquial words, is felt
as somehow impersonal, uninvolved, overly 'objective'. In other words, the
stylistic demotions which many Turkisms have suffered through the pressure
of other words have not necessarily endangered their existence as part and
parcel of the standard language.

Occasionally, however, the pressure from above has proved to be too much for
some Turkisms. The competition of new and more prestigious synonyms forced
them into some negative connotative category, such as ironical, derisive, or
pejorative. Thus, what were probably once normal, that is stylistically
neutral, words are today loaded with mischief and causticity. Here we find
verbs, adjectives, and nouns — many of the latter abstract ones. Because of
their often elevated semantic content, such abstract nouns etc. were mostly
replaced in educated speech and writing: the Balkan intelligentsia wanted to
break at any price with the patriarchal past, which it regarded as
semi-barbarous and backward. Consequently, the only stylistic domains left
to such Turkisms were rather low ones. It was probably this very discrepancy
between elevated semantic content and low stylistic status that caused them
to acquire

58. Labelled as "colloquial" in RMJ. The same dictionary
labels as "archaic" the variant form belaj.

59. Škaljić 1966, p. 16. Rumanian belea probably
belongs here as well, but as I found it nowhere accompanied by a stylistic
label, it may possibly be stylistically neutral.

Nouns
referring to concrete objects were not spared either. We get an idea of what
must have happened to some of them, when we read the following passage on
Rumanian: "words borrowed from neighbouring languages were often eliminated
deliberately, under the impact of the fashion which wanted everything to
come from the West. Such words as han 'inn' (Turkish han),
birt
'alehouse', suliman[61] 'make-up', macat
'blanket', etc. were replaced by hotel, restaurant, fard, cuvertură. At
a certain moment it became difficult to sell a merchandise under its old
name, which had begun to characterize rustic varieties, [62]
or junk, whereas under their French name the same commodities could be sold
at higher prices" — Graur 1967, p. 56.

There
has certainly been a considerable decrease in the number of Turkish
loanwords throughout the Balkans during the past one hundred years or so.
Although Turkisms are rather common in the standard colloquial, there are
other styles, such as expository prose, where they hardly ever occur.
[63]
As to the Turkish suffixes adopted into the various languages, those are
certainly not very productive today, except perhaps for producing a comical
or pejorative effect — both of which functions

60. Şăineanu (1900) has some masterful passages on the
role of Turkisms (and often of Hellenisms as well) in Rumanian folk humor
and humoristic literature, and on the funny situations created by the
tensions of the transitional period, in the 19th century, between the
semi-Oriental past and the 'European' future — pp. 68-69, 256-257, 278-279.
See also Bronsert 1968, p. 95 and passim.

61. DLRM gives as the source of suliman the
Turkish word sülümen, which Hony 1957 glosses as "corrosive
sublimate".

62. Something similar must have happened to Greek
τσο(υ)ράπι — see p. 107, above.

63. This is not true of all the languages to the same
extent. E.g., Albanian strikes me as having a slightly greater number of
Turkisms in expository prose than does, say, Greek.

113

should not be dismissed as unimportant, by the way. All the same, I cannot
agree with Krajni (1965, p. 151) when he says that there are only a few
Turkisms still left in Albanian and that even those will be reduced to a
minimum. I don't think this can be said of any Balkan language as yet — much
less of Albanian. Let us for a moment disregard the not-so-few lexical
Turkisms which are either stylistically neutral or else belong to the
lexical stock of the standard colloquial. And let us also leave aside the
traces which Turkish has left on the grammar of East South Slavic, on the
toponymy and anthroponymy of the entire area, on the stock of idiomatic
expressions, on the semantic content of many words, and so on. Even so, that
is even if we limit ourselves to the stylistically most marked Turkish
loanwords and the by now allegedly mostly unproductive Turkish suffixes, we
still have a lot of Turkisms left in the Balkans. The stylistically marked
Turkisms have enriched the expressive and stylistic potential of every
Balkan language — Krajni 1965, pp. 149, 151; Stojkov 1952, pp. 169-170;
Triantaphyllidēs 1963a, pp. 112-114. Some of them have pejorative overtones,
others are labelled as ironical or derisive, some carry the epic overtones
typical of certain historical words, still others are characterized as
vulgar. All of those connotative shades are used for stylistic effect by
Balkan speakers and writers — Mirčev 1952, p. 124; Škaljić 1966, p. 16;
Şăineanu 1900, pp. 256-257.

Some
lexical Turkisms, of all stylistic categories, constitute more or less large
derivational families, which may have been an additional factor in their
survival and vitality — Skok 1935, p. 252; Bronsert 1968, p. 110. For
example, Bulgarian rezíl 'shame, disgrace' (Turkish rezil
'ville, base; disreputable ; disgraced ; scoundrel'), reziljá ' to
hold up to disgrace, to be a disgrace to', reziljá se 'to bring
shame/disgrace on oneself, and Greek ρεζίλι '(object of) ridicule/shame',
ρεζιλίκι (ditto), ρεζιλης 'ridiculous/ ludicrous fellow', ρεζιλεύω 'to make
ridiculous; humiliate', ρεζιλεύομαι 'to bring shame on oneself; to become
ridiculous; to be humiliated'. Other loanwords which have a very good chance
of surviving for a long time are those stylistically neutral ones which have
entered the basic vocabulary of a given language, that is those which refer
to concepts or concrete objects of everyday life. For example, Albanian
çerek in the sense of 'quarter of an hour' (Turkish çeyrek), or
the various words for 'pocket' (Turkish ceb): Albanian xhep,
Bulgarian džob
and džeb, Greek τσέπη, Macedonian džeb, Serbocroatian džep.

But
we cannot assess the importance, vitality, and durability of Turkish
elements by taking into account only the overt ones, that is the loanwords,
suffixes, and names. Even if we were to make complete counts of all

114

Turkish lexical elements in all the Balkan languages, we still would not get
but a very incomplete picture — cf. Schroeder 1965. For almost as important
and certainly as likely to survive for a long time are the covert Turkisms,
that is the very few grammatical ones, as well as the very many lexical and
semantic ones.